Adjunct Underground

A Collectively Read Audiobook of Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education

http://adjunctunderground.kchungradio.org

Adjunct Underground is proud to present an audiobook of Joe Berry’s fantastic book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education! 69 current or former adjunct instructors have banded together to each read and record short portions of the entire text! Adjunct Underground is proud to offer this broadcast as a downloadable podcast on KCHUNG Radio, that can be listened to online, or in adjuncts’ cars as we drive from campus to campus!

The paperback version of Joe Berry’s amazing book can be purchased at Powell's and via other independent booksellers!

More info on the book: http://www.reclaimingtheivorytower.org

Total running time: 7h:11m:6s

. . .

Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education

Track 1

Adjunct Underground Communique #5 - 03-03-2014

INTRODUCTION (20:31)

The Introduction features the voices of Joe Berry, Elana Mann, Reid Friedson, Candice Lin, and Marc Herbst!

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Track 2

Adjunct Underground Communique #6 - 03-10-2014

Chapter 1 – Contingent Faculty Today: Who We Are (44:03)

Chapter 1 – Contingent Faculty Today: Who We Are, features the voices of Joe Berry, Cecilia Woloch, Ken Ehrlich, Natilee Harren, Laura Bouza, Arik Greenberg, Amanda Ackerman, and Amy Blount Lay!

Sections in Ch. 1:

• Contingent Faculty Today: Who We Are

• Corporatization: Higher Education in the Service of Capital

• A Few Statistics

• Are Part-Timers Professional Educators?

• Good Work but a Bad Living

• How Our Class Position Has Changed

• Other Big Losers: Students and Society

.

Track 3

Adjunct Underground Communique #7 - 03-17-2014

Chapter 2 – Contingent Faculty Organizing (1:28:33)

Chapter 2 – Contingent Faculty Organizing, features the voices of Joe Berry, Jessica Lawless, Josh Cho, Gordon Winiemko, Lee Kottner, Martha Lattie, Kristina Quynn, Marco Di Domenico, Alison O'Daniel, Lisa Ohlweiler, Tim Warneka, Robert Craig Baum aka Migrant Intellectual, Scott Cazan, Nancy Popp, Anonymous, and G Douglas Barrett!

Sections in Ch. 2:

• Contingent Faculty Organizing

• Material Conditions and Power Relations

• Consciousness: How Our Colleagues Think

• Our Full-time Tenured and Tenure Track Colleagues

• Administrators' Perspectives and Vulnerabilities

• Who Are the Activists?

• The Message: Respect

• Specific Demands

• Competitive Unionism: Good, Bad, or Indifferent for Contingent Faculty

• Arguments for Union Competition

• The Politics of Lists

• Appointment to Union Staff. Promotion or Demotion and for Whom?

• Reverse Engineering a Good Union: Participant Action Research

• Guide for a National Strategy

.

Track 4

Adjunct Underground Communique #8 - 03-31-2014

Chapter 3 – The Chicago Experience (02:01:46)

Chapter 3 – The Chicago Experience, features the voices of Joe Berry, David P. Earle, Betsy Smith, Denise Johnson, Asha Schechter, Don Hassler, Brianne Bolin, Robert Ovetz, Gabie Strong, Lisa Regula Meyer, Betsy Lin Seder, Jack Longmate, Howard Hastings, Sarajo Frieden, William Lipkin, Anne Wiegard, Nancy Kane, Melody Rodari, and Nicole Antebi!

Sections in Ch. 3:

• The Chicago Experience

• Map of the Metro Chicago Workforce

• Head Counts

• Demography

• Income

• Unionization

• Organizers' Voices

• How and Why We Got Involved

• Campaign Beginnings

• How We Chose a Union

• What We Did Right

• What Did Not Work

• How the Employer Responded

• Organizing Committees and Who Leads Them

• Relations with Union Staff

• Negotiating a First Contract

• Contrasting Viewpoints

• Building a Real Union

• Future Strategies, Visions, Goals

• Lessons from Interviews

.

Track 5

Adjunct Underground Communique #9 - 04-28-2014

Chapter 4 – A Metro Organizing Strategy (45:58)

Chapter 4 – A Metro Organizing Strategy, features the voices of Joe Berry, Dorothy Gaffney-Madsen, Jane Arnold, Maria Vitale, Lydia Field Snow, Julian Brown, Maurie Peaslee, Margaret Hanzimanolis, Maria Maisto, and Karen Lentz Madison!

Sections in Ch. 4:

• A Metro Organizing Strategy

• Research

• A Contingent Faculty Center: Virtual and Actual

• Services

• Assistance for Organizing

• Regional Publicity

• Direct Demands and Advocacy

• Alliances, Coalitions, and Solidarity

• Alternatives in Sponsorship and Organizational Structure

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Track 6

Adjunct Underground Communique #10 - 06-30-2014

Chapter 5 – Getting Down to Work: An Organizer's Toolbox
PLUS An Afterword from Joe Berry! (1:50:15)

Chapter 5 – Getting Down to Work: An Organizer's Toolbox, features the voices of Joe Berry, Adam Overton, Alex Kudera (Fight for Your Long Day), Curt Gambetta, Haruko Tanaka, Sandy de Lissovoy, Asher Hartman, Kat Jacobsen, Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut, Agnes Bolt, Amanda Yates Garcia, Nate Page, Martin Lastrapes, Ana M. Fores Tamayo (Adjunct Justice), Kate Durbin, and Alyssa Picard!

Plus a Final Note read by Joe Berry!

Sections in Ch. 5:

• Getting Down to Work: An Organizer's Toolbox

• Even Two Make a Committee

• Building a Committee: Finding People and Developing Issues

• Building Relationships: Taking Care of Each Other

• Acting like a Union

• Dealing with Divisions

• Defining Who Is In

• Race, Gender, and Similar Divisions

• Communications: From Office Whispers to the Internet (through "Email" section)

• Websites

• Analyzing the Opposition: Power, Politics, and Strategic Planning

• Some Institutional Advantages We Have

• We Are Not Alone: Finding Allies

• Tenure Track Faculty

• Final Note

• Acknowledgments

. . .

From the back of the book:

Reclaiming the Ivory Tower is the first organizing handbook for contingent faculty—the thousands of non-tenure track college teachers who love their work but hate their jobs. It examines the situation of adjunct professors in U.S. higher education today and puts forward an agenda around which they can mobilize to transform their jobs and their institutions.

Full of concrete suggestions for action and based on extensive interviews with organizers Reclaiming the Ivory Tower is the most comprehensive and engaged account to date of the possibilities for a movement that has important lessons for labor organizing in general, as well as for the future of higher education.

Joe Berry teaches labor education and history at the University of Illinois and Roosevelt University in Chicago and chairs the Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor.

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